Welcome to UD RESEARCH

This exciting magazine showcases the discoveries, inventions and scholarly excellence of UD's faculty, staff and students. Our latest issue highlights a variety of environmental research across the UD campus, with impacts locally and around the world. Keep up with UD's growing research enterprise.

A laboratory for the nation

Mark Barteau
Senior Vice Provost for Research and Strategic Initiatives, and the Robert L. Pigford Chair of Chemical Engineering

“Think Globally, Act Locally.” We have probably all seen this admonition on bumper stickers and elsewhere. It
is indeed a valuable reminder that even with challenges as global as the health
of our planet and the life it supports, individual decisions and individual
actions matter.

At the same time, the world in which we live is far too interconnected for
individual actions to solve global problems, or even for the individual to
fully appreciate all the consequences of his or her decisions. As we look at
the challenges facing our society, from environmental preservation and
amelioration, to clean energy, to a healthier society, to public education that
prepares students for the “flat” world in which they will live, the common need is for scalable solutions. We
seek ideas, systems, technologies, best practices that can be developed and
tested at a meaningful scale, and that can be reproduced and adapted on
national and international scales.

Enter Delaware! Our “Small Wonder” state and its flagship university continue to grow in their importance as a
laboratory for the nation. Earlier this year, Delaware was named one of the
first two states to be selected for Race to the Top funding by the U.S.
Department of Education. This effort seeks to create new paradigms for public
education in the 21st century by working at the statewide level.

University of Delaware faculty have been especially involved in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teacher education and building
capacity to deliver rigorous STEM courses statewide, as well as assisting
school leaders to develop evidence-based plans for school improvement.

The Delaware Health Sciences Alliance, a partnership of the University of
Delaware, Thomas Jefferson University, Christiana Care Health System, and
Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children, is aimed at the development of
health care solutions from bench to bedside, and to assessing the impact of
these on population health at the statewide scale.

Delaware’s Sustainable Energy Utility and enabling legislation for vehicle-to-grid
technologies, both products of UD research and policy scholarship, represent
first-in-the-nation, scalable solutions to our energy future. Our Critical Zone
observatory, one of only six funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses
on key watershed issues that have regional impact and solutions that can be
applied far beyond. The University’s new wind turbine on the Lewes campus is already providing electric power to
the grid, while serving as an important research facility for wind turbine
technology in a marine environment. There are no offshore turbines anywhere in
the Americas, and thus the knowledge that will be gained from this UD
initiative promises to affect clean energy development and deployment on the
scale of the hemisphere.

These are just some of the ways that the University of Delaware is driving the
creation of knowledge, technology, education and policy of national importance.
Delaware as a laboratory for the nation is not an idle dream, but a recognition
of leadership and impact that grow every day. The redevelopment of the former Chrysler Newark assembly plant site into a
science and technology campus that will house new ventures and partnerships
opens new opportunities to translate university research, scholarship and
creativity into truly scalable solutions.

“Think globally, cultivate locally.” The opportunity to do great things rests on thousands of individual efforts,
inspirations and interconnections. By any quantitative measure, the University
of Delaware is among the nation’s prominent research universities, and our pace is accelerating. But the real
excitement comes not from the numbers, but the people. The best part of my job
is learning about new research and creative activities of our faculty and
students, from the arts to technology, from the local to the global. I hope you
also will enjoy some of those “best parts” through the stories in this issue.